Jobs and Budgets

Well, I've got 3 interviews next week. One is for the Boeing Help Desk position, one is for a job in Verizon stores doing on-site tech support for their phones, and the last one is with a competitor to TEK Systems who wants to steal me away from them. The Boeing job will be around $14 or $15 per hour, giving me about $2000 per month income. The Verizon job would only be about $12 per hour, so about $1600 per month. If I find an apartment in the $750/month range (which is high for what I'm looking for), and utilities are about $125, and I spend another $350 on food and gas and entertainment (heavily weighted towards entertainment), that puts my budget at about $1225 per month. Add in some cell phone expenses, stuff for Stormy, and other misc bills or w/e at $75, that brings it up to $1300 per month.

Based on this, I can survive and even put some money away with the Verizon job. The Boeing job would allow me to put more money away for long term stuff. But in all honesty... right now I'm leaning towards the Verizon job over the Boeing one. For one thing, the Boeing job is a call center environment. Each call cannot exceed 660 seconds, blah blah blah. Also, it's a 24x7 call center, so there would be night shifts and all that not-fun. That isn't something I am at all interested in doing, and I think that very quickly I would dread going to work. The Verizon job on the other hand would be me hanging out at a Verizon retail store with one other tech, manning the customer service counter, teaching people how to change their wallpapers, troubleshooting problems, doing software upgrades, swapping out defective parts, etc. Hands-on work, and I've been in enough cell phone stores recently to see those techs in action, and they all seem to really enjoy their work. They are either busy or bored, just like retail clerks, but there's always something for them to play with. The Verizon job starts out with 2 weeks of paid training in which we get to actually diagnose and fix defective phones, after that, there are a lot of training courses available, and each one passed results in an increase in your job title as well as your pay. The classes range from technical to managerial, and all are available all the time. It sounds like a good place to start, get my hands dirty, and get some extra training. Of course, there's always the wildcard, which is KForce Staffing. I've told them where I am with TEK right now, and that my overriding priority is to get to get my hands dirty with real pc tech or w/e sorta stuff. When I go in to talk to them, hopefully they'll have a few positions I might be interested in.

Now, my schedule for next week is going to be interesting. I've got the KForce interview on Monday, which is good, they won't be expecting an answer from me right away on anything, I can just ask them to put my name in and see what happens and that'll be that. Tuesday I may have a fourth interview with a company that does beta testing of XBox games, I'm not expecting anything to come from that tho, I expect the pay will be too low for my budget. Sometime Monday or Tuesday I should get a call from the regional manager for the Verizon job to set up a face to face that week, so probably Wednesday. My interview with Boeing is scheduled for Thursday. If I don't make a definite decision while I'm at any of these interviews, then Friday will have to be decision day.

So, that's where things are at right now. You'll notice that paying off my debts isn't part of my budget. That's something I will do when I can, but it is no longer my absolute top priority. I *need* to kick back and enjoy life, and so instead of paying off that crap I'm going to reinvest that money into an annual membership to the Museum of Flight, the ability to go out to movies and dinner at restaurants, *gasp* shopping, and anything else that strikes my fancy. I know that I can't do that forever, the van's life is limited and whatnot, but I really need this, so I'm just gonna tell Murphey to f-off for a little while longer.

Personally, I'm doing... ok I guess right now. I'm still not eating much, although it has gotten better in the last 12 hours. For those of you who hadn't heard, I've lost about 10lbs and about 3% body fat in the last 4-5 days from not eating or drinking much of anything. The first 2 days I didn't eat or drink anything at all, but I've been steadily increasing how much and how often I can eat since then. It's not that I haven't been absolutely starving, but that my stomach refused to accept much food, I would begin to feel sick after just a few pieces of pasta. The cause is of course emotional/mental, but there isn't much I can do aside from just keep going until things get better. It's also very frustrating right now, since I've decided to make all these changes in my life, and yet I don't have the ability to yet. But that will change soon enough.

Poor Pat tho... I don't envy his situation. He's interested in 2 girls right now, both of whom are interested in him, but beyond that everything turns into a complete mess. Girl 1, Emily, is 19 years old and graduating college in less than a year, she met him at soccer and thinks he's cute, she's got some really messed up parents, a messed up brother, and is a very driven person. Girl 2, Sylvia, is an old friend of his that he's known for about 2 years, apparently that entire time they've been interested in each other but one or both have been in relationships and thus never could do anything about it. She's got some interesting sexual preferences that he's not quite sure about, and he also doesn't know just what exactly she's looking for, whether it be a fun fling or a serious relationship or what. He says he is looking for a serious relationship, something long term, but of course at this point it's impossible to tell which if either of the girls is looking for the same thing. That's just the absolute barebones of the situation, it gets much much worse as you get into details. Personally if I were him I would probably back off for 2-3 months, just to see which girl is still interested at that point. But, he's a man of action. If he's convinced Sylvia is looking for something long-term, he'll go with her and ditch Emily, if not, then he'll have to figure out what Emily is looking for.

Personally, I think for once in his life he should stop trying to catagorize his relationship as "serious" before it's even begun. I think when you enter into a relationship, first you're just interested, then you're dating, then you're a couple, then you get serious, and then you get to thinking about a ring. I don't think you can start a relationship as a "serious" relationship. Heck, I'm not even sure what he means by "serious" sometimes... I mean, it goes without saying that if you're in a relationship with someone, then that's the only person you're in a relationship with, regardless of what stage you're in. So... since that is the case in the mind of anyone on this planet that you should even consider being in a relationship with... what's the point of slapping the "serious" label on it? Does that mean you want to start having sex right away? Does that mean you want some sort of promise like a pre-engagement sorta thing? Does it have to do with how many hours out of the day you spend together? Or is it just a safety net, because a girl in a "serious" relationship is less likely to look at/for someone other than you? Or... could it be a mental crutch, to keep you from looking at/for a girl other than her? Regardless, even if what you are looking for is a "serious" relationship, whatever that means, in order for it to work, in order for it to be valid and have any chance of success, it has to have made it through the earlier stages. The progression of a relationship is supposed to be a weeding out process, if you don't go through that process, and you try to imagine a ring on the finger of everyone you date the first time you date them, then you're not dating intelligently, and you're begging to get hurt and to hurt others more than is necessary. Our own past is a perfect example tbh. You can't just... well, that's not right, because you CAN, but you *shouldn't* just put a ring on every girl's finger to see how it fits, either mentally or emotionally. For one thing, relationships, like people, grow and change over time, sometimes they become better, sometimes worse, but you have to give it time to happen in. For another, it's like firing a gun at random inside a busy club, you're basically just taking pot shots at people, hoping one is the right one, instead of figuring out who it is you want to shoot, and then making sure that your target is that person.

Oh well, I'm sure that watching what unfolds over the next few months will be an interesting and educational experience for me, and hopefully for Pat as well.